SPEAKERS - SYDNEY 2016

Tristan Goode

CEO and Board Director, Aptira

CEO and Board Director, Aptira
Over 25 years’ experience in the IT industry has given Tristan a solid reputation as an innovative architect in systems infrastructure and enterprise solutions. Forward-thinking with strong attention to detail, Tristan has been responsible for designing, implementing and maintaining solutions for the likes of BTR Nylex, NEC, OzEmail, Intel, and iPrimus.

Tristan has an unwavering commitment to exceed expectations for both the business and the customer, and is driven by his personal desire to create unique, effective solutions for any requirements Aptira’s customers may present. Tristan is a founding and 4 times elected Board Director of the OpenStack Foundation, an OpenStack Ambassador, and the founder of the Australian OpenStack User Group.

Jonathan Bryce

Executive Director, OpenStack Foundation

Jonathan Bryce, who has spent his career building the cloud, is Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation. Previously he was a founder of The Rackspace Cloud. He started his career working as a web developer for Rackspace, and during his tenure, he and co-worker Todd Morey had a vision to build a sophisticated web hosting environment where users and businesses alike could turn to design, develop and deploy their ideal web site – all without being responsible for procuring the technology, installing it or making sure it is built to be always available. This vision became The Rackspace Cloud. Since then he has been a major driver of OpenStack, the open source cloud software initiative.

Chris Wright

CTO, Red Hat

Chris Wright is Vice President and Chief Technologist at Red Hat where he is leading engineers who work on cloud computing, distributed storage, software defined networking and network functions virtualization, containers, machine learning, and continuous delivery. During his more than 20 years as a software engineer he has worked in the telecom industry on high availability and distributed systems and in the Linux industry on security, virtualization, and networking. He has been a Linux developer for over 15 years, most of that time spent deep in the Linux kernel.

He is passionate about open source software serving as the foundation for next generation IT systems. He lives in sunny Portland, Oregon where he is happily working with open source projects such as OpenDaylight, Open vSwitch, OPNFV, OpenStack, Open Container Initiative, and Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Chris is currently a board member of OpenDaylight and OPNFV.

Scott Coulton

DevOps Solution Architect, Health Direct

Scott Coulton is a solutions architect with 10 years of experience in the managed services and hosting space. He has extensive experience in architecture, and rolling out systems and network solutions for national and multinational companies with a wide variety of technologies, including AWS, Puppet, Docker, Cisco, VMware, Microsoft and Linux. His design strengths are in cloud computing, automation and the security space.

Steve Tegeler

Director of Systems Engineering, VMware

Steve currently leads a team of experts who help customers deploy OpenStack in their organizations. Over the last 10 years Steve has spent a tremendous amount of time with IT departments making choices around IaaS. Steve came to VMware through the acquisition of Nicira. At Nicira, Steve spent time not only on Network & Security virtualization, but the overall automation strategy. He’s seen a lot of success, and also a lot of failures.

Geoff Stewart

Technical Lead – Configuration Automation, Bankwest

Geoff Stewart has been in the IT industry for over 23 years delivering business critical systems for utility and financial organisations. He has spent the last few years at Bankwest promoting and implementing DevOps related change initiatives whilst living and breathing infrastructure as code.

Peter Lees

Chief Technologist, SUSE

Peter Lees is chief technologist for SUSE in Asia-Pacific, charged with developing awareness of SUSE technologies & capabilities throughout the region. He has extensive experience in the IT industry, especially in open systems, IT infrastructure, and network computing, including roles at NetApp and Sun Microsystems, together with early involvement in Australia’s Internet industry.

David Flanders

Research Community Manager, University of Melbourne | Community Wrangler, OpenStack

David F. Flanders is a wrangler of communities for the OpenStack Foundation, specifically growing the application developer community and University sector engagements. Previously having worked in University datacentres and Entrepreneurial investment funds, Flanders loves the challenge of understanding how brilliant people come together as a community to shape the future of the information sector.

Avi Miller

Product Management Director, Oracle

Avi is an accomplished technical product manager with extensive experience across the operating system, virtualisation and application stacks.

Avi has spoken at numerous conferences, in particular at linux.conf.au in Australia and several times at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco as well as Oracle OpenWorld Asia in Shanghai.

Rik Harris

Cloud Technology Strategy, Telstra

Rik is an experienced IT professional who has been working in corporate and government Australia for around 25 years. He has been with Telstra since 2003 in several roles, including running IT infrastructure deployment teams, managing engineering for Telstra internal shared infrastructure and currently responsible for technology strategy for Telstra’s Cloud business.

Roland Chan

COO, Aptira

Roland has been in the Internet industry for almost twenty years, running business critical technology delivery organisations to build some of Australia’s largest telco, ISP and digital media solutions at OzEmail, WorldCom and Telstra.

Roland’s focus on engaging with customers and understanding their needs combined with a cutting edge technology delivery method makes Aptira a flexible delivery partner for any organisation.

In 2015, Roland assumed Aptira’s seat on the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors.

Anthony Rees

Cloud Technical Consultant / Architect, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Anthony has over fifteen years experience in software design, architecture, cloud solutions and development activities. During this time he has utilised his consulting skills as a support to major organisations around the world. Anthony has a keen interest and vast experience in Continuous Delivery working with many teams in various countries to implement Test Driven Development techniques, Feature Toggling best practices, Platform as a Service designs, Infrastructure as a Service, Build Automation, OpenStack and leverage DevOPS methodologies. He is experienced in Agile methodologies such as Lean, XP, Scrum and certified as a Scrum Master and SAFe Scaled Agilist.

Matthew Hurford

Systems Engineering Director, NetApp

Matthew Hurford is the National Systems Engineering Director for NetApp Australia. In this role he is responsible for managing the technical pre-sales team, technical alliances and supporting the sales teams in Australia and New Zealand.

During his 6 years at NetApp, Matt has helped shape the NetApp Managed Service capability in ANZ in his role as a Professional Services manager. Since taking on the leadership of the Systems Engineering team he has built an industry leading pre-sales team and has been instrumental in local product management and developing utility commercial models for enterprise accounts.

Matt has over 20 years of experience in the IT industry and has held numerous roles; including mainframe systems programmer, automation specialist and infrastructure architect. He has a passion for managing people and has over 10 years’ experience building high performance teams.

Matt has a very broad range of experience covering many aspects of IT, including virtualisation, data analytics and hybrid cloud solutions. He holds a degree in science and still has a passion for ecology.

Alex Tesch

APJ Cloud Consultant, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Alex has been working with Open Source enterprise technologies for the better part of his 12 years IT career in companies like Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Red Hat and IBM.

He started his OpenStack journey with Grizzly, delivering the first HPC cloud in APAC for a Singapore University making use of SRIOV technologies combined with big data. He has extensive deployment experience on configuration management and automation of private cloud based on OpenStack.

Alex is currently an APJ Cloud Consultant in the Helion Cloud team at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, where he evangelizes the OpenSource side of the Helion portfolio (OpenStack / Cloud Foundry / Ceph).

He enjoys running workshops and seminars in the APJ region for cloud adopters.

Nathan Ness

Staff Systems Engineer, VMware

Nathan Ness has been a part of the Networking and Security Business Unit at VMware since the acquisition of Nicira. His background includes datacenter networking and security with an emphasis in cloud and virtualization technologies. Currently at VMware he focuses on anything & everything related to OpenStack + VMware. He holds certifications in Cisco, Microsoft, and VMware NSX.

Craig Stevens

Principal Software Engineer, Brocade

Craig is a Principal Software Engineer at Brocade and has held various CTO, architectural and software engineering positions working with Service Providers throughout Asia Pacific. Craig is able to draw on his background and experience to give a unique perspective on this new software paradigm.

Andrew Hatfield

Practice Lead – Cloud Storage and Big Data, Red Hat

Andrew has over 20 years experience in the IT industry across APAC, specialising in Databases, Directory Systems, Groupware, Virtualisation and Storage for Enterprise and Government organisations. When not helping customers slash costs and increase agility by moving to the software-defined storage future, he’s enjoying the subtle tones of Islay Whisky and shredding pow pow on the world’s best snowboard resorts.

During his 6 years at NetApp, Matt has helped shape the NetApp Managed Service capability in ANZ in his role as a Professional Services manager. Since taking on the leadership of the Systems Engineering team he has built an industry leading pre-sales team and has been instrumental in local product management and developing utility commercial models for enterprise accounts.

Matt has over 20 years of experience in the IT industry and has held numerous roles; including mainframe systems programmer, automation specialist and infrastructure architect. He has a passion for managing people and has over 10 years’ experience building high performance teams.

Matt has a very broad range of experience covering many aspects of IT, including virtualisation, data analytics and hybrid cloud solutions. He holds a degree in science and still has a passion for ecology.

Gerard Chami

Technical Support Engineer, Cumulus Networks

Gerard is a Technical Support Engineer for Cumulus Networks and a founding members of the Australian support team. Since joining Cumulus Gerard has enjoyed working with Open Source and DevOps tools to help bring web-scale architectures and efficiency to enterprise networking. Prior to joining Cumulus Networks, Gerard worked at Cisco Systems where focused on emerging data centre solutions including UCS, Nexus Switching and ACI

Scott Laffer

Technical Support Engineer, Cumulus Networks

Scott works at Cumulus Networks as a Technical Support Engineer. Always a fan of networking, while at Cumulus, Scott has enjoyed being a part of the Linux networking evolution. He is passionate about using NetDevOps tools to build, maintain and troubleshoot new generations networking architectures, all utilising the power of Linux. Scott started his career as a network administrator, before joining Cisco Systems to work with their high end Nexus switching range.

Bruno Lago

Entrepreneur, Catalyst IT Limited

Bruno Lago is a solutions architect that has been involved with the Catalyst Cloud (New Zealand’s first public cloud based on OpenStack) from its inception. He is passionate about open source software, cloud computing and disruptive technologies.

Andrew Howard

HPC and Cloud, National Computational Infrastructure

Andrew has many decades of hands-on technical, diplomatic and logistics experience covering a wide range of standard and bespoke technologies, languages and applications within Industry, Government and Academia nationally and internationally.

A fascination with computers and networking as a student lead to Andrew pioneering implementations of networks starting with installing the first Ethernet in Australia at Digital Equipment Corp in the early 80’s, the first fibre optic extended Ethernet in the mid 80’s, national converged DECnet, TCP/IP, SNA and X.25 networks in the late 80’s, ISDN, Frame relay and secure networks in the early 90’s, development and operation of one of the first Internet Service Providers in Australia in the 90’s, managing the development and delivery of the next generation Australian National Research and Education Network GrangeNet and AARNet3 networks, managing the development and operation of the Australian Government ICON fibre network and setting world speed records in International networking in the early part of this century.

Since joining the Australian National University in 2006 he has managed the evaluation, development and implementation of high speed communications systems, fibre networks and collaboration facilities. He represents the University at International Research Network groups including APAN, Internet2 and TNC and has held the positions as Co-Chair of a number of APAN Working Groups. As Co-Chair of the APAN E-Culture working group for many years he lead the production of the Dancing Q and Dancing Across Oceans Performance events.

His current role at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) working on High Performance Computing and Cloud systems has lead to the development of InfiniCloud an extension of HPC InfiniBand capabilities into OpenStack Clouds and the creation of the first trans-Pacific extended InfiniBand network connecting Australia and Singapore through the USA to deliver the next generation of high speed data transfer and distributed computation.

Rarm Nagalingam

Senior Consultant, Red Hat

Rarm is a Senior Consultant at Red Hat working with customers to deploy and manage their cloud infrastructure. As a passionate cloud advocate, he has assisted in the migration of workloads running on legacy virtualisation to the cloud. Rarm has over 13 years of experience in the ICT industry, specializing in rapid development of bespoke systems.

Allen Samuels

Software Architect / Fellow / Systems and Software Solutions, SanDisk

Allen joined SanDisk in 2013 as an Engineering Fellow, he is responsible for directing software development for SanDisk’s system level products. He has previously served as Chief Architect at Weitek Corp. and Citrix, and founded several companies including AMKAR Consulting, Orbital Data Corporation, and Cirtas Systems. Allen has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Rice University.

Dr Shunde Zhang

Senior Software Developer, Aptira

Shunde is a senior software developer in Aptira with over 15 years experience in software development, automation and system administration. He has worked with OpenStack since the Diablo cycle and has been involved in projects from OpenStack infrastructure to distributed systems running on top of OpenStack.

Tony Breeds

Software Developer / OpenStack Stable PTL, Rackspace

Tony Breeds is the Project Team Lead for OpenStack Stable Branch Maintenance within Rackspace’s Global OpenStack team. Tony’s extensive experience in using OpenSource goes back to 1991, not long after Linus Torvalds released the first Linux Kernel. Since then he has held roles as a Systems Administrator, Network Architect, Kernel Developer and Engineering Manager.

Rahul Dutta

Technology Head, OneGov

Rahul heads up technology for OneGov, which provides digital services to the Public and a large section of NSW Government. He directs technology strategy, software development and operational leadership to a highly committed technology team.

In the last 20 years, he has been involved technology strategy, architecture and leadership roles in Public Sector, Finance & Banking and Consumer Electronics businesses. He has worked in Australia and overseas, in large and small organisations, from technology start-ups to global multinationals, and holds a BE in Computer science.

Tyler Britten

Technical Advocate, Blue Box – An IBM Company

Tyler has spent the last 15 years working with cloud, virtualization, and infrastructure technologies. Prior to joining Blue Box, an IBM Company, Tyler was a Principal Technical Marketing Manager and a vSpecialist at EMC. He also worked as a technical consultant for a small infrastructure reseller, a network engineer for a Fortune 1000 company, and also freelanced as an IT consultant for small businesses.